Raffles and Raffle Tickets

Discover how the little-known SEQ command in Word lets you really easily create numbered raffle tickets yourself at home. You don’t need Excel for this method.

Step 1: Create your basic ticket layout in Word

Either download a template from the internet, or create your own layout. Remember your ticket will probably need a ticket stub where you write the name of the purchaser. And your ticket stub and the main ticket will need to have the ticket number printed on them. Obviously all the tickets need a different number, but we'll come to that in just a moment. Here's my layout:

Step 2: Select your typed ticket number and toggle "Field Code" mode

Select the ticket number you have typed and hit CTRL+F9 (Windows) or CMD+fn+F9 (Mac). This surrounds what you typed with a special pair of curly brackets. You can't just type these brackets directly - you have to hit CTRL+F9 (or CMD+fn+F9 on a Mac):

Step 3: Type the magic code!

Instead of '0001' (what I typed as the first ticket number), type this between the curly brackets:

SEQ 0001-1000 \# "0000"

Make sure you leave a space at the start and end of this bit of code, so it will look like this on your screen:

{ SEQ 0001-1000 \# "0000" }

This code will create numbers from 0001 to 1000. If you need a different range, just replace '0001-1000' with whatever you need, e.g. for tickets from 0599 to 1099 use:

{ SEQ 0599-1099 \# "0000" }

Don't worry that your layout will start to look messed up because typing the code pushes everything else around. Once you toggle the code back to displaying the ticket number, the layout will pop back into place.

Step 4: Type more magic to put the same ticket number on the other half of the ticket (you'll get a different number on each individual ticket in a moment):

Select where you typed the second number on the other half of the ticket and hit CTRL+F9 (or CMD+fn+F9 on a Mac) again. This time type the following between the brackets:

{ SEQ 0001-1000 \# "0000" \c}

Note the '\c' at the end - that indicates to Word to use the same number as on the other half of the ticket.

Again, don't worry that the code is messing up the layout and wrapping onto two lines. It'll sort itself out in the next step.

Step 5: Toggle your magic code back to displaying numbers.

Hit Alt+F9 (Alt+fn+f9 on a Mac) to toggle the display from displaying the field code to displaying the output of the code: your numbers.

Powertip: Did the code just disappear and no numbers replaced it? Fear not. Hit CTRL+A (cmd+A on a Mac), then F9 (fn+F9 on a Mac). That will update your fields and you should see something like this again:

Step 6: Copy your ticket down the page

Now copy the whole ticket and paste down the page, so you have four tickets (or as many as you like - the numbering will work automatically).

At first, the numbering won't look right, and every ticket will have the same number, like this:

Step 7: Update the fields

Hit CTRL+A (cmd+A on a Mac) to select everything. Then F9 (fn+F9 on a Mac) to update, and you should see a different number on each ticket, but each ticket will have the same number on the stub and the other half:

Step 8: Copy all this to get as many tickets as you need

Copy everything on your page and paste on a fresh page. Keep doing that until you have as many tickets as you need. The numbering will look wrong at first, but do the same update trick (CTRL + A, then F9) and it will sort itself out: